January 2007 Archives
Monday, 01 January 2007
Reflections On Hanging
Apparently, according to the hyped DJ from Red Dragon Radio, anyway, Cardiff had the second largest open air (I’m too tired and drunk to work out where the hyphens should go) party in the UK after London. (Scotland was beset by storms.)
Anyway, I’ve read a lot of commentary since I learned that Saddam had been hanged. (7 am GMT - my learning, not the hanging, which going by hilzoy and John Cole Americans could, with a matchstick to each eyelid, stay up for.)
I don’t often agree with Norman Geras these days, but I do on this. Saddam should not have been hanged. He goes on He should not have been, because judicial execution is not a morally defensible practice. Apart from other reasons, it brutalizes the community that inflicts it.
I’d like you to read his whole post, should you be so kind, because he raises several points.
I am not saying that I think Saddam was an innocent. I accept that he was guilty of atrocities.
There are many good commenters. Read Sam Leith.
What we’ve been seeing over the past couple of days is the pornographisation of a judicial process. There’s no question that Saddam’s crimes were terrible. There’s no question that, however jury-rigged the legal process by which he was held to account for them, it is proper that he was held to account. But our fever of excitement over that hempen rope is no more than the baying of a mob.
Why, for example, do we seem surprised that the Prime Minister didn’t issue some statesmanlike pontification on the subject? What was he supposed to say? Would we have admired him for emerging from a Bee Gee’s swimming pool to declare to camera, trunks still dripping: "Tee hee! Snappy-snap-snap went his horrid old neck. Goody gumdrops. I do hope it hurt"? Shades, there, of David Blunkett’s uncharming announcement that he was planning to toast Harold Shipman’s death with a bottle of bubbly.
Channel 4 has translations of the execution. Barbaric, yes, but shades of avec des cris de haine
at the end of L’Etranger.
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Wednesday, 03 January 2007
Didn’T You Used To Have An Actual Reason To Be Famous?
I don’t watch TV and I’m really not going to watch Celebrity Big Brother. What the hell is Ken Russell doing? And Dirk Benedict, author of Lost in Castration?
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Saturday, 06 January 2007
Does Martin Kettle Do Irony?
The current decline of public trust in the reliability of government statistics is spectacular. An Office for National Statistics survey in 2005 underlines just how dire the situation has become. It found that a mere 17% of people think that government statistics are free from ministerial interference and only 14% say that government uses the figures honestly.
Me, I think they just made those numbers up. Kettle:
The bill attempts to redress this problem.
We should never pretend that everything - or maybe anything - can be entirely reduced to or solved by a table and a graph.
Wide open goal - and what do we get? The usual tedious quasi-Stalinist oh so pious We should ...
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Monday, 08 January 2007
Paranoid?
Spend billions searching for alien life forms and then... KILL THEM
Indeed. (Via Centauri Dreams.)
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Idiocy
If you look at the front page of Power Line right now, you’ll notice two things. One is a photo of George W Bush apparently pledge allegiance to the Israeli flag (the flag next to it is partly green, so perhaps it’s Ireland, and the picture was taken in the UN or somewhere with every flag). The other is Assrocket on Jamil Hussein.
Who? Well you could start here and follow the link to this.
I’ll confess that I was wrong about this: my reaction (which, for once, didn’t make it to teh interwebs) was that Jamil Hussein was a cover - with death squads everywhere in Iraq, I wouldn’t want my identity known either. But I was wrong: there is a Jamil Hussein.
But what do you expect? How about a Pajamas Media exclusive: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Reported Dead [of cancer]. The mainstream MSM, ever ready to spite the US and Israel went with the other version: Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei Appears on TV After Suffering Stroke. Even israelnationalnews.com is helping the terrorists now! (PM blogger John Cole wasn’t convinced by their exclusive either.)
Poor Powerline, they were hacked, and Assrocket invited readers to heap abuse on the moron who hacked us
on this forum.
Sample:
It’s a sign of popularity in the internet age: Run a site worth enjoying, and some fan of freedom of speech tries to disrupt you. Luckily cached items are readily available.
I’ve never been hacked - ergo I’m not popular. I knew that anyway, and I can live with it.
Sample:
I think someone was never told that he couldn’t do anything he wanted to do and never learned to share, he has now evolved into something people loathe… this incident is part of his general narcissistic compulsions. When you catch him send to me, I’ll give him the spanking he so deserved.
Etc. Well. Oh dear. Via Balloon Juice’s Tim F.
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Tuesday, 09 January 2007
Amusing Incident Of The Day
Torygraph: US submarine collides with tanker.
An American nuclear submarine has collided with a [Japanese] oil tanker in the Gulf.
Quite clearly, the Japs are at fault. What they were doing at a hundred fathoms in stealth mode will need to be explained.
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Higgs-Boson Knew My Father
Father knew Higgs-Boson: well Peter Higgs anyway.
BBC: Experts home in on ’God particle’.
BBC in history: ’God particle may not exist’ (2001 - the year, not the film). This was also the opinion of Stephen Hawking as reported in the Independent. I admire Stephen Hawking, as does the Torygraph Leader writer, but I’m far from convinced that he’s the greatest scientist (or physicist) since Einstein - as the article says, this means passing over Paul Dirac (British, despite the surname) - and, as it doesn’t, Richard Feynman. Not to mention one of my intellectual heroes (though I’ve denied having any such things) Steven Weinberg (who pretty much belies the conceit behind the Indy article: his first book The First Three Minutes was about cosmology - and he’s a particle physicist!). These decisions are best left to history.
I’m not a physicist (thrown out in my second year; graduated in psychology), but I’m largely with Hawking here, if for the near-moronic reason that mass is everywhere, how come its elementary particle exists and is so hard to find?
Bonus kind of irrelevant cartoon and commentary.
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Irony Is Dead
I use ’irony’ so much, I’m the Alanis Morisette of teh blogs. Still (via Philosoraptor), Holy Jesus Christ!
John Cole (who, as I’ve said too often, has the sane view from the right) has the sane view from the right.
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Thursday, 11 January 2007
Hindsighters
Via Matthew Yglesias, Jeff Weintraub supports the Euston Maniesto.
If you’re tired of sterile screaming in the wilderness, tired of the comfortably ensconced "hindsighters" poring over every American error in Iraq, tired of facile anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism, try the Euston road in 2007. It might actually lead somewhere.
I don’t know who these comfortably ensconced
are. Liz Hunt in the Torygraph reluctantly admires Robin Cook.hindsighters
Yet, three years on, as Blair embarks on a frantic round of "legacy shopping" – anything but Iraq – and Gordon Brown cements his role as the party’s Pontius Pilate – washing his hands of everything, especially Iraq – it is Cook’s own legacy that may be the most secure, thanks to Gaynor.
Cook wasn’t right through hindsight - he was right with foresight. It’s the pro-war crowd who are frantically revising things and suddenly seeing all the errors in Iraq (and most are American; we’ve made a few, but nowhere near as many as the Septics).
This, from the inimitable Michael Ledeen has to be my favourite ’benefit of hindsight’ excuse.
[Another] excellent recommendation is to dramatically increase the number of embedded Coalition soldiers. ... Note that an increase in embeds doesn’t necessarily require an increase in overall troop strength. We’ve got lots of soldiers sitting on megabases all over Iraq. They should be out and about, some of them embedded, others just moving around, tracking the terrorists, hunting them down. I don’t know how many guys and gals are sitting in air-conditioned quarters and drinking designer coffee, but it’s a substantial number. Enough of that.
So, that’s why the terrorists are winning! Too much designer coffee. And the troops are lazy. Tell that to the Marines. No really. Ledeen’s own contribution is neither more nor less than writing an essay for a policy journal on the need for longer tours of duty.
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Saturday, 13 January 2007
Email To The Prime Minister
Dear Tony Blair,
I, for one, welcomed your speech from HMS Albion.
It can’t be said often enough that our armed services should accept that "conflict and therefore casualty may be part of what they are called upon to face". Under your fine leadership they may learn this, however I would like to suggest a way for you to inspire your troops even when they are in distant countries and do not get to hear your fine words.
I suggest that you send every soldier a photograph of yourself, small enough to keep with himself or herself whenever they are in uniform. Perhaps you could even sign these for officers above the rank of captain.
This great country of ours should be seen as the second power in Iraq. George Bush has bravely sacrificed no fewer than 3,028. British fatalities stand at a meagre 128. Hence I share your concern. British troops are simply not willing enough to die for your legacy. A simple bit of PR should set that right. Perhaps you could send all the troops Labour membership cards as an additional sign of goodwill, and as a way of raising membership as too many so-called supporters have deserted since you became PM.
If, tragically, some bureaucratic oversight in the Ministry of Defence continues to ensure that our troops receive essential armour and their officers misunderstand their orders and continue to protect their men, you could round up a few thousand from some Northern Regiment and detonate a tactical nuclear weapon. Just to show who’s boss and give the Iranians a fright,
yours, bravely supporting the war,
Dave Weeden
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Sunday, 14 January 2007
I Reach For My Gun
Hold on, I hate writing when angry. That’s never stopped me before, but this this is a whole level up.
Via Matthew Turner, Gerald Baker in the Murdoch Times creeps up Tony’s ass. Appartently it’s the intelligensia
at fault. As in, When I hear the word --, I reach for my gun
. What next? Elect a new people?
Via the Magistrate, I’ve found DOD official slams US law firms for defending Guantanamo detainees.
The former Navy lawyer [US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles "Cully" Stimson] said "It’s shocking...The major law firms in this country...are out there representing detainees.
America, like this country still being full of counter-revolutionary running dogs, still has some opposition to this.
Progressives everywhere will have signed the Euston Manifesto and can look back with pride at the sad days when only Mao’s and Stalin’s agents only arrested the guilty. Now America has woken up! Our agents are perfect and judges and juries are redundant.
Who could criticise Blair or Bush now? Only traitors.
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Gary Farber Needs Help
Or more specifically, he needs money.
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Tuesday, 16 January 2007
Going For The Indian
Don’t say we don’t do the important news stories here on backword. OK, I’ll concede that this isn’t earth-shattering, but it’s interesting sociologically. I have both tehgrauniad and Torygraph news feeds, and I find this comparison interesting. I think good news reporting should be objective
, though I find I’m a little uncertain what I mean by that. I usually find that the Torygraph sketches in facts better, which fewer judgemental adjectives. However, in the case of the latest Sleb Big Brother story, it’s the Torygraph which is the more emotive. Perhaps tehgrauniad’s writer, Leigh Holmwood, thought there was no need to be.
tehgrauniad Record complaints for Big Brother (note: no reason given in headline). Torygraph: Thousands complain over Big Brother ’racism’ (note: the racism is alleged, hence the scare quotes - this is both clearer, and attempts to be impartial: if you’re fluent in the quotes code, of course).
The former mentions one important aspect the latter ignores.
The mood of anger at the alleged bullying inflicted on housemate Shilpa Shetty by Danielle Lloyd, Jo O’Meara and Jade Goody spread to parliament today, when Labour MP Keith Vaz tabled an early day motion condemning the Bollywood star’s treatment.
Mr Vaz’s motion said Big Brother had a "role to play in preventing racist behaviour" in the house and called on the programme to take "urgent action to remind housemates that racist behaviour is unacceptable".
I’ve no affection for Keith Vaz, and this doesn’t kindle any. I also think the first paragraph up to and including ’when’ is at least partly nonsense: if it provokes an image, it is some sort of fetid cloud of a ’mood of anger’ (which seems like both nonsense and a pleonasm at the same time) which drifts up the Thames until it encloses the Houses of Parliament. The report doesn’t say where this ’mood’ started (and Keith Vaz could have been the first ’victim’ - we can never know).
In contrast, rightly or wrongly (rightly in my opinion, if we don’t know what was said or done, how can we judge if it was racist or not?), the Torygraph gives the provocation.
Angry viewers claim Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty is being victimised by fellow housemates Jade Goody, Danielle Lloyd and Jo O’Meara.
In last night’s episode, Jo declared that Indians are thin because they are always ill as a result of undercooking their food.
They also complained that Shilpa had touched other housemates’ food with her hands, with Danielle saying: "You don’t know where those hands have been."
Allegations of racism first surfaced when Jade’s mum Jackiey moved into the house.
She repeatedly referred to Shilpa as "the Indian" and refused to pronounce her name properly. Jade’s boyfriend Jack has also been accused of using a racist insult to describe Shilpa, which Channel 4 deny.
tehgrauniad at least explains the latter and gives Channel 4’s reply.
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Wednesday, 17 January 2007
Somehow, I Doubt D2 Would Vote For Him
Craig Brown asks So, where are they all now?
In the mid-1980s, [he] quit showbusiness for good. A brief foray into estate agency on the South Coast ("Buy this desirable property or get stuffed") came to nothing. An upturn in his fortunes came in 1992 when the Liberal Democrats adopted him as a prospective parliamentary candidate for Hove.
Many predicted a bright future for his robust and forceful character; others felt that, in calling for the public execution of red-heads, [he] was veering too far from official party policy.
A commenter doesn’t find this funny (not the ’public execution of red-heads’ bit, I’m sure we can all agree there, but the occasion). Jesus Christ, today - in one incident on one day in one city - Explosion at Baghdad university kill[ed] 65. That’s tragedy. A junkie offing himself is comedy.
And a pertinent question for our time:
In the early 1970s, I attended a concert at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, by an exciting young group called Ugly Rumours. I have often wondered what happened to their lead singer, whose name was something like Anthony Blear, or Blore. Is he still performing? If so, where can I catch up with him? Does he have a Fan Club?
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The Important News Stories
Good god, when I wrote Don’t say we don’t do the important news stories here on backword I was kidding. Now the BBC carries all these: Channel 4 denies Brother ’racism’ (rubbish); Switch off Big Brother - Cameron (I already have); and Gordon Brown has become involved in the row over alleged racism on Celebrity Big Brother during a visit to India. Not to mention the Torygraph Big Brother race row gathers steam in India.
I said yesterday that I wasn’t convinced by tehgrauniad’s report. But I quoted this approvingly:
However, Channel 4 has confirmed that fellow housemate Jack Tweed did not call Shilpa a
Pakias had been reported on many websites.
I should not have done. I wasn’t happy about the confirmation of a negative (BB watchers may be better lip readers than Channel 4 workers for example), but now the very wonderful Grace Dent (sometime Grauniad hack) writes:
Then, with Jackiey Budden dispatched last Wednesday, quickly the Jack Tweedy alleged racism problem kicked off. In brief, at some point just after Jackiey’s eviction, Jack Tweedy, Jade’s largely silent boyfriend, was shown on Channel 4 making a bleeped derogatory comment about Shilpa Shetty.
It’s difficult to ascertain exactly what Jack said. However, the combination of Jade’s shocked expression, amateur lip-reading and the fact that unbleeped offensive language is so normal on post-watershed Big Brother that the comment had to be something bloody terrible to be censored at 10pm, led many viewers to assume the worst. Many people accused Jack of saying
Paki.
C4’s denial isn’t good enough. As far as I can tell, he said something derogatory (which you may not have gathered from the denial) and he wasn’t reprimanded (Big Brother is heavily into rules, so this is not a remarkable demand).
Grace does, however, justify the scare quotes I also mentioned yesterday.
Over the past week we’ve watched Jade, Jo and Danielle join together to outcast Shilpa Shetty. It’s classic schoolyard tactics, really. The trio huddle together in secret conversations. They bitch about Shilpa continually, finding fault with her voice, her walk, her manners, her cooking, her looks and her supposed inflated ego. They make stupid remarks about Shilpa’s culture, which aren’t specifically racist but just show them up for a distinct lack of brains.
She doesn’t think their behaviour is racist (but, like me, she’s white) - but certainly nasty. Nasty enough, in my view, for C4 to do something, whether or not there is a -ism or 20,000 complaints.
Well, perhaps we’ve learned something about multiculturalism. It’s not Shilpa (or Jermaine Jackson, as the show prefers to name the man ’[n]ow calling himself Muhammad Abdul Aziz’) who won’t integrate.
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Is This Emotional Blackmail?
Yesterday I had a phone call from a very nice fundraiser (male - this may make a difference later) for Amnesty International. (I think my membership has currently expired and my bank is bouncing standing orders so technically I’m not a member at present.) Anyway, you can go to Amnesty’s site and see what they do, and I support all that. I’m pretty big on libertarianism, and generally I don’t like the state doing nasty things to individuals. (This makes me an evil Foucault-reading enemy of David Blunkett, as I’m not particularly happy with the idea of prison either.) I’m very strongly against any kind of detention without trial, and, of course, the death penalty. (I value my concept of ’civilisation’ or ’being civilised’ far higher than whatever it costs to keep every murderer the state doesn’t kill in prison for life.)
Now, if you click on What We Do you get much the same. I still agree with all of it, but the first item on the menu on the left (in my browser anyway) is Stop Violence Against Women. This is also something I support. But it’s not obviously part of amnesty’s constitution or remit or whatever, and nor is it spelled out on their home page. Which brings me to my fundraiser.
He thanked me very nicely for my support in the past, and told me about their new project which is stopping violence against women in Russia. Apparently Russia is a violent place (I got this from the news) where domestic violence is common (I got this from Dostoyevsky). A lot of women are beaten by their partners, and they (Amnesty) would like to do something about this. Specifically, if I remember correctly (I was trying to formulate a reply by this point, which means you always listen a little bit less) they wanted to tell the police what to do.
Now, I’m altogether against domestic violence. And I think not hitting someone smaller and weaker than oneself is a moral principle taught in kindergartens or primary schools across the world. But, even though I did read a fair bit of criminology for my degree, I know fuck all about policing, and I don’t see any Moscow plods being greatly impressed by a half-arsed doofus like myself writing words to the effect: "OI BORIS, GET YOUR FINGER OUT YOUR ARSE, GOSPODIN, AND NICK SOME WIFE-BEATING THUG." From what I’ve read, Russia is jumping with guys who wouldn’t know a quaver from a quasar carrying balalika cases. I don’t envy the Russian police at all (though their backhanders may be nice). I’m not going to start telling them their job.
I fell out with Greenpeace when they moved off saving whales (which I support) to opposing GM crops (which I don’t). So clearly I’m an argumentative sod. But I joined Amnesty because it intervened when individuals were thumped by the state. Anything roughly answering that description gets my donation (when I’m in funds).
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Thursday, 18 January 2007
At Last, An Explanation
One thing that bothered me during the War phase of the Iraq War was that there must have been reasons for not going for regime change in 1991. (About the best post I can find from then is this one, but I’m sure I came back to it. I’m quite pleased at how much vacillating I did.) Anyway, I found a very good speech in a book I’m reading; I’ve tried to find it online, and I’m convinced that for whatever reason, it isn’t (it was delivered in 1992 to the Discovery Institute). So I reproduce it here.
Well, the question often comes up about Saddam.
My own personal view continues to be that he is not likely to survive as the leader of Iraq. I emphasize that’s a personal view. You can get all kinds of opinions. That’s based on the fact that he’s got a shrinking political base inside Iraq. He doesn’t control the norther part of his country. He doesn’t control the southern part of his country. His economy is a shambles. The U.N. sanctions continue to place great pressure on him. We’ve had these records of an attempted coup at the end of June, early July, against him. I think he - I think his days are numbered. ...
The question that is usually asked is why didn’t we go on to Baghdad and get rid of him? And let me take just a moment to address that if I can, because it is an important issue. Now, as you think about watching him every day, it’s tempting to think that it would be nice if he weren’t there, and clearly we’d prefer to have somebody else in power in Baghdad. But we made the decision not to go on to Baghdad because that was never part of our objective. It wasn’t what the country signed up for, it wasn’t what the Congress signed up for, it wasn’t what the coalition was put there to do. We stopped our military operations when we’d achieved our objective - when we’d liberated Kuwait and we’d destroyed most of his offensive capability - his capacity to threaten his neighbours. And no matter what he may say today, he knows full well that he lost two-thirds of his army, about half his air force, most of his weapons of mass destruction, a lot of his productive capability. His military forces were decimated, and while he can try to regroup and reorganize now, he does not at present constitute a threat to his neighbours
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Hooray For The Carphone Warehouse
I bought my first mobile from the Carphone Warehouse. Their service was excellent. I recommend them. Of course, while that’s true, I’m writing this because CBB sponsors [the Carphone Warehouse] pull out over racism row.
Carphone Warehouse chief executive Charles Dunstone said: "We are totally against all forms of racism and bullying and indeed this behaviour is entirely at odds with the brand values of The Carphone Warehouse.
"As a result we feel that as long as this continues we are unable to associate our brand with the programme. We had already made it clear to Channel 4 that were this to continue, we would have to consider our position."
Hell, I almost suggested that the sponsor should pull out, but I never thought it would happen.
From today’s Snowmail (for American readers, the name comes from the aggressively liberal anchor Jon Snow (peace be upon him, and would that there more of his kind).
Have you seen the Truman show? If not you’ll be watching it on Channel 4 News tonight. Because quite simply the Big Brother farrago has now reached absolutely unbelievably proportions.
MPs on the floor of the house demanding Channel 4’s licence be revoked, Ken Livingstone, he of the reference to concentration guards when talking to a Jewish reporter, also wants the channel shut down. The Indian finance minister has found himself having to comment on it all.
Is this the silly season or are we watching one of the most disgraceful episodes of racist misbehaviour in the history of person kind?
I must confess that I feel in the midst of the Truman-esque moment watching you, watching me, watching them, watching you, watching me. Somebody needs to pull the chain fairly soon and just return to the reality that a television station is transmitting an albeit edited account of what happens when you put a whole lot of rather odd people in a box and take the key away.
Its a phenomena [sic - pedantic DW] that has produced all sorts of crazy antics in the past and just at the moment when we thought the whole genre was in trouble, it’s come back to beat us over the back of the head.
Tonight, the Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell says the show is deplorable ’racism as entertainment’. We’re trying very hard also to get an interview with the chief exec of Channel 4 who’s been out for the first time since this all blew up defending the continued transmission of the show.
Sunny Hundal, one of tehgrauniad’s sensible bloggers is very good: A sign of the times. (NB D2 would note that the url is ’burning_big_brother_effigies.html’ so that was Sunny’s own title; some sub ed decided to chuck in an irrelevant Prince reference.) The comments are shocking as always: some pretty disgusting misogyny for instance. Apparently ’Angry from Eastbourne’ had his comment deleted but Jonnyboy71 still quotes him:
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The ’Militarisation’ Of Space
Torygraph: US condemns China’s satellite-killer test.
China drew fire from the United States for testing a space weapon that could be used to destroy satellites and other US equipment in orbit.
US intelligence agencies believe that China launched a ground-based "satellite-killer" missile on Jan 11 to destroy an aged and obsolete weather orbiter, 587 miles above the earth’s surface. The weapon, which US intelligence believes was launched from the Xichang space centre, destroyed its target through a "kinetic impact" – or direct hit – the US said.
The sophistication of the launch and the weapon’s ability to track and home in on a tiny satellite has raised fears that the major powers are heading towards the "militarisation" of space.
Jebus guys, have you forgotten this already. Or, it’s OK for us, we’re the good guys. Hypocrisy not included. (See, I am anti-American really.)
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Sunday, 21 January 2007
A Sign Of Unwanted Change
Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field has my favourite sentence for a long time.
But to many longtime residents, soccer is a sign of unwanted change, as unfamiliar and threatening as the hijabs worn by the Muslim women in town.
Via Philosoraptor.
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Monday, 22 January 2007
How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Hate The Left
A brave new book is out which bravely scolds liberals and tells them where they went wrong.
Yes! It’s Dinesh D’Souza.
Also: D’Souza confronts Steven Colbert and tries to answer the question What is it with gay people and maggots?
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Name A Country That Begins With U
This is fairly long at nine minutes, but worth it. Americans don’t know the religion practiced in Israel, but then some don’t know the religion of Buddhist monks, or which state KFC comes from.
Via Cynical Chatter From The Underworld. I don’t think I’d recognise John Howard, which may support CCFTU’s point.
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Tuesday, 23 January 2007
Some Explaining To Do
P O’Neill posts:
The list of people who served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland during and since the period covered by the report into police collusion with loyalist paramilitaries (1991-present) makes for interesting reading, not least in light of the apparent continuing ambitions of a couple of these people.
Which it certainly does. It’s tempting to think of all this as having happened a long time ago, but Peter Mandelson was Secretary of State from October 11, 1999 to January 24, 2001 a period which certainly included the death of
Tommy English, 40, Protestant, shot at his home in front of his three children in 2000.
However, that was something Mr Mandelson can’t be expected to have been aware of.
Nuala O’Loan, the Police Ombudsman, disclosed in her 160-page report that she had met resistance from officers who, when questioned, were accused of providing evasive, contradictory, farcical and untrue answers and delaying requests for information for up to 2½ years.
It’s one thing not to know what the police are doing in secret. It’s another to allow delays for ’requests for information for up to 2½ years’. If members of the RUC really did behave as Ms O’Loan alleges, then Peter Mandelson, John Reid, Paul Murphy, and Peter Hain have some explaining to do.
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Left Field
I should never even look at tehgrauniad’s Comment is Free. It is total rubbish. Elsewhere in tehgrauniad a subeditor summarises Roger Graef and explains why it exists at all.
Budget cuts and ratings, rather than inspiration and ideas, now dictate television programming
Comment is Free is cheap. No printing costs; distibution costs (bandwidth) are nugatory. No offices, no foreign correspondents, no photo journalists, no lunches or international phone calls. As for ’inspiration and ideas’ - it has neither.
I was cheered by one CiF piece though. The response to this trash by Frank Field has been splendid. Even MarkGreen0 and ’Mike’ from Harry’s Place have stayed away. Frank Field is now embarrassing. I used to think he was a principled member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, now I wonder if there is any such thing.
Still, he’ll probably write a whining review You’re A Right Bunch of Bastards
by Nick Cohen now.
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We Loves Christopher Hitchens
No, we does really. In a kinda ironic way. Who remembers this?
I am assuming for now that this is a single-issue election. There is one’s subjective vote, one’s objective vote, and one’s ironic vote. Subjectively, Bush (and Blair) deserve to be re-elected because they called the enemy by its right name and were determined to confront it. Objectively, Bush deserves to be sacked for his flabbergasting failure to prepare for such an essential confrontation. Subjectively, Kerry should be put in the pillory for his inability to hold up on principle under any kind of pressure. Objectively, his election would compel mainstream and liberal Democrats to get real about Iraq.
The ironic votes are the endorsements for Kerry that appear in Buchanan’s anti-war sheet The American Conservative, and the support for Kerry’s pro-war candidacy manifested by those simple folks at MoveOn.org. I can’t compete with this sort of thing, but I do think that Bush deserves praise for his implacability, and that Kerry should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty.
A Slate sub-ed understandably read the last bit as ’... I do think... that Kerry should ... report for duty [eg the Presidency]’ but a correction says that was not what Hitchens meant. He wrapped his meaning up so tightly in rhetoric that no one could figure it out. How he takes after George Orwell!
The Dupe was right about one thing - the ’single-issue election’. It sure as hell wasn’t the economy: Sterling nears the $2 mark. But gosh, who ever voted for economic security (boring) when they could have a war (fun) instead?
He keeps the high Orwellian apidistra flying in his review of a new work critical of the left and the left’s support of Islam. Yes! Good old Mark Steyn has written a book. I find, as I’ve said above, Hitchens incredibly hard to parse, so I don’t always know what he’s banging on about.
In the prologue to his new book, America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It, Mark Steyn sarcastically alludes to two people whom, in different ways, I know well.
Now, I suppose he could know one as it were biblically and other to speak to. However, are there really different ways to know people? I suppose I know Darwin in a sense, so perhaps yes. But then, I don’t know Darwin in the sense Hitchens suggests here. I know he and Martin Amis are friends, but I don’t think he knows Jack Straw at all.
Jack Straw, now the leader of the House of Commons, made a speech in his northern English constituency in October, in which he said that he could no longer tolerate Muslim women who came to his office wearing veils.
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Hooray For Mark Holland
It’s been too long since I linked to Blognor Regis, but I go a fair way to supporting Thin skin sought.
I ask you though, really, what’s more unpleasant in the grand scheme of things? Giving the Legion D’Honneur to a scumbag like Harold Pinter? Or an 18 year old girl saying, in possibly a throwaway fashion - does anybody remember laughter - "I’m quite for the British Empire. I’m quite for slavery and things, but that’s never going to come back." Cue tabloid "racism" frenzy, but who says slaves have to be black huh?
Now, I greatly admire Harold Pinter and I consider blindness to the merits of his early plays an irredeemable fault. I don’t support slavery at all. (One of the reasons I love Patrick O’Brian is Stephen Maturin’s near-but-not-quite anachronistic hatred of slavery.) Still, the kid’s 18! We don’t take 18 year olds seriously! It’s so unfair, I know, but it is for the best. Jade Goody is 25 now which is about the age I’d suggest we take women seriously - for men it should be, well - 40 sounds about right. Maybe that’s a bit heavy. Realistically, and I’m a bachelor, perhaps no one should be taken seriously - that is quoted by the papers - until they’re married, until that is, they’ve persuaded someone else to take them seriously. Clearly this might be tough on the young William Hague or on Peter Cuthbertson - or even on Gordon Brown in 1997. But would anyone say the world would be worse for my suggestion?
Since I like to sprinkle my posts with little known facts, I read in the Sunday Mirror (in the bogs in Chapter) - not online - that Jade’s paternal grandfather was black. Not that this absolves her from the charge of racism; and the paper also found someone who claimed Jade had bullied her at school. What is online (for the moment) is Geoffrey Beattie’s assessment. I used to admire Professor Beattie when he wrote for the Grauniad, and I think he’s right here.
Now people say that Big Brother and TV generally have coarsened society (I’m not going to link to Comment is Free): it’s certainly coarsened the Radio Times.
The one brilliant thing about a WAG entering the CBB house has been to hold a magnifying glass up to what life at home must be like for poor, hopefully deaf, Teddy Sheringham.
Can any of us imagine what it must be like for a 41-year-old man to be trapped in a house with this stupid little girl day in, day out? She must be dynamite in bed that’s all I can hope, because the long winter nights must be bloody scintillating hearing her talk about frocks. Why haven’t you married her already, Teddy? Why?!
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Sombre
I’ve posted this at Aarowatch, but as it’s so good, and as it illustrates Jonathan Derbyshire’s and Ian McEwan’s arguments so well, I’ll link to this sombre video. Turn the speakers up, this is class. (PS Don’t forget to be serious; anyone caught smiling, well, they get their crate of beer.)
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Monday, 29 January 2007
Oh
Sam Leith on Gordon Brown.
He’s also good on PETA, on which more anon no doubt.
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